UI/UX Design – Voicebot
What is an Alexa skill?
“The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a software development framework that enables you to create content, called skills. Skills are like apps for Alexa” (What is the Alexa Skills Kit? n.d.). Users can customize Alexa skills using the blueprints provided in the Alexa app or create custom skills from scratch and use them on their Alexa-enabled devices. These skills enable users to use voice commands to perform tasks such as making a checklist, creating a pet sitter guide, or designing a randomizer.
About CU Denver Student Event
Student Event gives information about upcoming events for CU Denver students. It can provide suggestions, add events to your calendar, and answer common questions about this week’s events, such as event details, directions, fees, prizes, and more.
Goal
My goal for this voice assistance is to gather all the information about upcoming events in one place so students can quickly assess them without spending too much time jumping around all the different platforms.
Persona
CU Denver Students aged 19-25 have busy working and studying schedules but enjoy attending student activities. They are unfamiliar with where to find information about school activities and do not have an Instagram account to follow the school’s pages.
Problem
CU Denver’s primary way of advertising student events is through bulletin boards and Instagram accounts. There are some problems with these approaches. The bulletin boards are scattered around campus, and it is hard to see all the information about CU Denver since the Auraria campus is shared among three institutions. They also have many Instagram account for each department and group, which makes it hard to keep track of what their content is about. Furthermore, some students do not use social media and will not be able to find information if they are not on campus often.
Design Process
I started this project by creating a few skills using Alexa blueprints to understand how these skills work. I then started listing all the possible questions users might have and building my Q&A based on that. The most important thing to me was predicting what users might say and adding that to the variants to avoid any dead end in the conversation. I made the first version of this skill using the Q&A blueprints, but I did not like how repetitive the default Alexa sounded. After some discussion with my instructor, I decided to use Voiceflow instead of Blueprints to create the final version of this skill because I wanted my skill to be more customizable. It was easier to work on Voiceflow because I already have a speech pattern from the Alexa skill. I designed the paths based on that. I tested the skill several times to find design flaws and asked my partner to try it. I changed some of the questions and added some more variants and information to this skill based on the feedback I got from him.
Usability Study Analysis
I wanted to learn from this user testing how to make the voice bot understand as many commands as possible. Knowing how people ask questions on the same topics helps me train my voice bot better and reduce any errors that might occur due to unrecognizable commands.
Regarding the qualitative analysis, Alexa did not capture their name as effectively as I expected. All of them suggested removing this part from the conversation. They also seemed confused when Alexa did not understand their pronunciations, creating errors that forced them to restart the session. It was frustrating for them to continue every time an error occurred. I think this problem happened because I decided to use Voiceflow for my design, and there is no way for the program to recognize the continuous session and should not restart it. Some users liked Alexa’s quirky responses because they created a more natural conversation feel.
For the quantitative analysis, users could complete 3-5 questions during each session. All users seemed unable to ask all the topics I intended them to ask because Alexa did not give them a full menu to choose from.
At the beginning of this project, I wanted to add the name capture function to make the conversation more personal. However, considering this is an Alexa device that usually serves one user, it is unnecessary to have this function. The tree path is a little repetitive, and I need to develop a better way to make the conversation more effective. I would also add a full menu as the intro so users know what is available to ask.
Peer Feedbacks
Retrospective
It was a fun experience customizing and designing Alexa skills. I can see how this is something users can really enjoy creating and using as it is relatively easy to customize and valuable for many daily life activities. Working on this assignment sparked my interest in design for voice assistance devices. The most challenging part about this project is ensuring I train the voice chat well with all possible utterances of the same topic. Predicting what other users might say is difficult since many ways exist to ask the same questions. I also made the conversation flow as effective and natural as possible by minimizing repetitions, providing variants of the same sentences, and using more casual language. I am thrilled with the positive feedback I got from my peers and the overall flow of the design. I think this project is more fulfilling than others because I can actually use these skills in my daily life and enjoy the work that I put in.
Mimi Nguyen's Design 